Implicit Bias in Employment Discrimination Litigation

Judge Nancy Gertner and Melissa Hart have recently posted their chapter, titled “Implicit Bias in Employment Discrimination Litigation,” (in Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law, Cambridge University Press, 2012) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract.

Judges exercise enormous discretion in civil litigation, and nowhere more than in employment discrimination litigation, where the trial court’s “common sense” view of what is or is not “plausible” has significant impact on the likelihood that a case will survive summary judgment. As a general matter, doctrinal developments in the past two decades have quite consistently made it more difficult for plaintiffs to assert their claims of discrimination. In addition, many of these doctrines have increased the role of judicial judgment – and the possibility of the court’s implicit bias – in the life cycle of an employment discrimination case. This chapter begins by examining the persistence of gender and racial disparity in the workplace despite the fact that laws prohibiting discrimination have been on the books for decades. Social science offers an explanation in the form of studies that describe the role implicit bias plays in those continuing inequities just as the legal system seems especially resistant to integrating their insights. The chapter goes on to explore the ways that doctrinal developments for assessing evidence in employment discrimination cases – the procedural mechanisms that guide the cases through the system – are a one-way ratchet that makes it harder and harder to prove that discrimination occurred and that enables the judge to enact his or her biases.

Download the chapter for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Nancy Gertner on the Situation of Feminism
• Judge Nancy Gertner on her Situation
• The Gendered Situation of Recommendation Letters
• The Double-Binded Situation of Even Women Lawyers
• Examining the Gendered Situation of Harvard Business School
• A Rose by any other Name Might Become a Judge
• Not Just Whistling Vivaldi
• The Nerdy, Gendered Situation of Computer Science
• The Situation of “Opting Out”
• The Gendered Situation of Science & Math
• The Situation of Sexism
• Sexual Harassment at Wal-Mart?
• Women’s Situation in Economics
• The Situation of Gender in the Workplace

Prejudiced at Age 3?

Excerpts from a recent Boston Globe article about recent work Situationist Contributor, Mahzarin Banaji:

For more than four decades, the notion that racism and physical prejudice don’t fully develop in humans until the teen or adult years has been at the root of research into racism. Popular scientific belief had been that children, who only develop the ability to express racial preferences at around age 3, gradually develop those preferences over time and only cement them well into their teen years.

But new research not yet published by Mahzarin Banaji, a renowned Harvard University psychologist, brain researcher, and racism and physical prejudice expert, and colleagues suggests that even though they may not understand the “why’’ of their feelings, children exposed to racism tend to accept and embrace it as young as age 3, and in just a matter of days.

“We have known for a very long time that children process information differently than adults. That is a given,’’ says Banaji. “But what has changed, where racism and other prejudice are concerned, is that we had far over-calculated how long it takes for these traits to become imbedded in a child’s brain. It’s quite shocking really, but the gist of it is that 3- and 4-year-olds demonstrate the same level and type of bias as adults. This tells us that children ‘get it’ very, very quickly, and that it doesn’t require a mature level of cognition to form negative biases.’’

Banaji’s study, conducted with two Harvard peers, examined how children and adults identified ambiguously featured faces as happy (smiling) or angry (frowning). They showed 263 white children, between the ages of 3 and 14, a number of graphically drawn facial images in different skin tones from very light tan to brown, and asked them to describe them as happy or angry.

One part of the test showed the children a set of faces that were an “inconclusive’’ light tan color that could have represented a white person or a black person. In that segment, most of the children, without prompting, described the faces as black, and also, no matter the facial expression in the drawing, as angry.

Conversely, those faces the children said they believed to be white – even the faces bearing frowns – were almost exclusively described as happy.

When the white children were asked to compare white faces with Asian faces, the outcome was the same . . . .

A group of black children tested in the study revealed equal favorability and negativity biases, regardless of whether they perceived the test faces to be black or white. . . .

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Jane Elliot’s Situationist Pedagogy
• Laurie Santos on the Evolutionary Situation of Cognitive Biases
• The Interior Situation of Infants
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• What does an Obama victory mean?
• The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions
• Perceptions of Racial Divide
• Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part IV

Image from Flickr.

Uncovering the Interior Situation

From AtGoogleTalks:

Every aspect of our mental lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us. Over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the unconscious, or subliminal, workings of the mind. This explosion of research has led to a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live. As a result, scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that how we experience the world–our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment–is largely driven by the mind’s subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed.

A small sample of related Situationist posts:

• Randomness, Luck, Chance, and other Situational Forces
• The Situation of Reason
• The Situation of Confabulation
• The Situation of Constitutional Beliefs - Abstract
• Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Processes
• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• The Unconscious Situation of our Consciousness – Part IV
• Unconscious Situation of Choice

Race and Dehumanization

I was very sorry to miss the Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law Book Launch Conference yesterday.  It’s rare for such a great set of law and mind sciences speakers to assemble in one spot and the topic continues to be of great importance for all those committed to ironing out injustice in our legal system.  But stuck in Philly, I did manage to “participate” vicariously . . . or, perhaps, more accurately: while doing some background research for some experiments that I am running with Penn’s Geoff Goodwin, I came across an article that I had overlooked a few years back that is of certain interest to all those who study law and race.

The article, Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences, offers a fascinating investigation of the mental association between Blacks and apes and its devastating consequences.  As the authors (Phillip Atiba Goff, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Melissa J. Williams, and Matthew Christian Jackson) explain,

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants’ basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black–ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts.  Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not. The authors argue that examining the subtle persistence of specific historical representations such as these may not only enhance contemporary research on dehumanization, stereotyping, and implicit processes but also highlight common forms of discrimination that previously have gone unrecognized.

Check out the whole article here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• Perceptions of Racial Divide
• Black History is Now
• Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” - Video
• The Situation of Presidential Death Threats
• The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race
• Black History is Now

Implicit Bias in the Law Conference – This Thursday

Date: Thursday, June 14, 2012, 9:00 AM
Location: Austin Hall, Ames Courtroom, Harvard Law School
Address: 1515 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Presenters include Situationist Contributors Mahzarin Banaji, Jon Hanson, Jerry Kang.

From the conference web page:

“Despite cultural progress in reducing overt acts of racism, stark racial disparities continue to define American life. This conference considers what emerging social science can contribute to the discussion of race in American law, policy, and society. The conference will explore how scientific evidence on the human mind might help to explain why racial equality is so elusive. This new evidence reveals how human mental machinery can be skewed by lurking stereotypes, often bending to accommodate hidden biases reinforced by years of social learning. Through the lens of these powerful and pervasive implicit racial attitudes and stereotypes, the conference, designed to coincide with the launch of the book “Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law”, examines both the continued subordination of historically disadvantaged groups and the legal system’s complicity in the subordination.

“The conference will bring together scholars, judges, practitioners, and community leaders to explore the issues surrounding implicit racial bias in law and policy. It will begin with a compelling overview of the social science. What does science teach us about automatic biases? And what do we still not know? Leaders in the areas of criminal justice, housing law and policy, education, and health care will then present overviews of the impact of implicit bias in their fields. Attendees will hear federal judges’ and leading scholars’ perspective on implicit bias claims in the courtroom and hear experts’ assessment of the future of implicit bias in the law. A lively afternoon session will include simultaneous break-out sessions and roundtable discussions of specific implicit bias related topics. Audience participation will be welcomed and encouraged. The conference will close with a discussion of setting a forward looking and collaborative implicit bias agenda.”

RSVP for the conference here.

Here is the conference agenda.

The Power of Stereotypes and Need for “Affirmative Meritocracy”

From Stanford University News:

When it comes to affirmative action, the argument usually focuses on diversity. Promoting diversity, the Supreme Court ruled in 2003, can justify taking race into account.

But some people say this leads to the admission of less qualified candidates over better ones and creates a devil’s choice between diversity and merit.

Not so, says Stanford psychologist Greg Walton. Diversity and meritocracy are not always at odds.

In fact, sometimes it is only by taking race and gender into account that schools and employers can admit and hire the best candidates, Walton argues in a paper slated for publication in the journal Social Issues and Policy Review with co-authors Steven J. Spencer of the University of Waterloo and Sam Erman of Harvard University.

Walton, an assistant professor of psychology, and Spencer plan to present their findings to the Supreme Court in an amicus brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case the justices are scheduled to hear next fall and that many court watchers believe threatens to upend affirmative action. (Supreme Court rules bar Erman, who was a recent Supreme Court clerk, from participating in the brief.)

“People have argued that affirmative action is consistent or is not consistent with meritocracy,” Walton said. “Our argument is not that it’s consistent or inconsistent. Our argument is that you need affirmative action to make meritocratic decisions – to get the best candidates.”

The researchers say that people often assume that measures of merit like grades and test scores are unbiased – that they reflect the same level of ability and potential for all students.

Under this assumption, when an ethnic-minority student and a non-minority student have the same high school grades, they probably have the same level of ability and are likely to do equally well in college. When a woman and a man have the same score on a math test, it’s assumed they have the same level of math ability.

The problem is that common school and testing environments create a different psychological experience for different students. This systematically disadvantages negatively stereotyped ethnic minority students like African Americans and Hispanic Americans, as well as girls and women in math and science.

“When people perform in standard school settings, they are often aware of negative stereotypes about their group,” Walton says. “Those stereotypes act like a psychological headwind – they cause people to perform worse. If you base your evaluation of candidates just on performance in settings that are biased, you end up discriminating.”

The conclusion comes out of research on what is called stereotype threat – the worry people have when they risk confirming a negative stereotype about their group. That worry prevents people from performing as well as they can, hundreds of studies have found.

As a consequence, Walton says, “Grades and test scores assessed in standard school settings underestimate the intellectual ability of students from negatively stereotyped groups and their potential to perform well in future settings.”

Walton gives an example of how stereotype threat relates to preferences in admissions or hiring.

A woman and a man each apply to an elite engineering program, he says. The man has slightly better SAT math scores than the woman. He gets accepted to the program, but she does not.

“If stereotype threat on the SAT undermined the woman’s performance and as a consequence caused her SAT score to underestimate her potential, then by not taking that bias into account, you have effectively discriminated against the woman,” Walton says.

Walton and his colleagues argue that schools need to take affirmative steps to level the playing field and to make meritocratic decisions. If the SAT underestimates women’s math ability or the ability of African American students, taking this into account will help schools both admit better candidates and more diverse ones.

While courts have ruled that diversity justifies taking race into account in admissions decisions, justices have not considered meritocracy as a reason for sorting by race.

“Our argument is that it is only by considering race that you can make meritocratic decisions,” Walton says. “It’s a separate argument from the diversity argument.”

Walton’s research provides the justices with another reason for upholding affirmative action.

But confronting legal questions is only part of the issue.

Walton says remedies need to be found in policy, as well. Environments need to be created that are fair and allow people to do well.

“The first step is for organizations to fix their own houses,” he says.

Testing officials should look at how they administer tests and ask what they can do to mitigate the psychological threats that are present in their settings that cause people to do poorly, Walton says.

Schools and employers, he continues, should look into their own internal environments and ask how they can make those environments safe and secure so everyone can do well and stereotypes are off the table.

But if stereotype threat was present in a prior environment, hiring and admissions decisions need to take that into account.

“In taking affirmative steps,” Walton, Spencer and Erman write, “organizations can promote meritocracy and diversity at once.”

The Citation: Walton, G. M., Spencer, S. J., & Erman, S. (in press). Affirmative meritocracy (pdf). Social Issues and Policy Review.

Related Situationist posts:

• Sapna Cheryan on Stereotypes as Gatekeepers
  
• The Pretense of Colorblindness
• Color Conscious Situation of Neighborhood Choice
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• What Are the Legal Implications of Implicit Biases?
• Unconscious Racial Attitudes
• Firefighters and the Situation of “Merit”
• The Situation of Ability
• Sian Beilock and Allen McConnell on Stereotype Threat
• The Gendered Situation of Math, Humanities, and Romance
• Not Just Whistling Vivaldi
• Women’s Situational Bind
• Performing Under Pressure
• The Nerdy, Gendered Situation of Computer Science
• Social Psychologists Discuss Stereotype Threat
• The Gendered Situation of Chess
• The Situation of Gender-Science Stereotypes
• The Situation of Gender and Science
• Stereotype Threat and Performance
• The Gendered Situation of Science & Math
• Gender-Imbalanced Situation of Math, Science, and Engineering
• Sex Differences in Math and Science
• You Shouldn’t Stereotype Stereotypes
• Women’s Situation in Economics
• Your Group is Bad at Math
  
• Belonging
• The Bar Exam Situation
• A (Situationist) Body of Thought
• The Situation of ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers

For a collection of previous Situationist posts discussing how situation influences standardized test scores, click here.

Image from Flickr.

Sapna Cheryan on Stereotypes as Gatekeepers

TEDxTalks on Apr 27, 2010 Stereotypes as Gatekeepers -

Sapna Cheryans research broadly examines how cultural stereotypes impact peoples choices and behaviors. She is particularly interested in the role that stereotypes play in determining peoples sense of belonging to important social groups.

In this talk, she asks why do women consider a future in computer science to a lesser extent than men? Might this be because the powerful image of the male computer geek makes women feel like they do not belong in the field?

A sample of related Situationist posts:

• The Nerdy, Gendered Situation of Computer Science
• The Situation of “Opting Out”
• The Gendered Situation of Science & Math
• The Situation of Sexism
• Sexual Harassment at Wal-Mart?
• Women’s Situation in Economics

Race and Racism Among Children

From CNN:

Anderson Cooper details a study that seeks to gain insight into the way black and white children perceive each other.

A sample of related Situationist posts:

• The Pretense of Colorblindness
• “Talk to an Iraqi” from This American Life 
• The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions
• Color Conscious Situation of Neighborhood Choice
• The Legal and Procedural Situation of Segregation
• Perceptual Segregation – Abstract
• Blood & Race
• Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t

Implicit Bias Conference at HLS – More Details Soon

Thursday, June 14, 2012, 9:00 AM
Austin Hall, Ames Courtroom, Harvard Law School
1515 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA<

Despite cultural progress in reducing overt acts of racism, stark racial disparities continue to define American life. This conference considers what emerging social science can contribute to the discussion of race in American law, policy, and society. The conference will explore how scientific evidence on the human mind might help to explain why racial equality is so elusive. This new evidence reveals how human mental machinery can be skewed by lurking stereotypes, often bending to accommodate hidden biases reinforced by years of social learning. Through the lens of these powerful and pervasive implicit racial attitudes and stereotypes, the conference, designed to coincide with the launch of the book “Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law”, examines both the continued subordination of historically disadvantaged groups and the legal system’s complicity in the subordination.

The conference will bring together scholars, judges, practitioners, and community leaders to explore the issues surrounding implicit racial bias in law and policy. It will begin with a compelling overview of the social science. What does science teach us about automatic biases? And what do we still not know? Leaders in the areas of criminal justice, housing law and policy, education, and health care will then present overviews of the impact of implicit bias in their fields. Attendees will hear federal judges’ and leading scholars’ perspective on implicit bias claims in the courtroom and hear experts’ assessment of the future of implicit bias in the law. A lively afternoon session will include simultaneous break-out sessions and roundtable discussions of specific implicit bias related topics. Audience participation will be welcomed and encouraged. The conference will close with a discussion of setting a forward looking and collaborative implicit bias agenda.

The Situation of Gender in the Workplace

From Harvard Business Review (part of an op-ed written by Lauren Stiller Rikleen):

The new millennium has not brought much progress for women seeking top leadership roles in the workplace. Although female graduates continue to pour out of colleges and professional schools, the percentages of women running large companies, or serving as managing partners of their law firms, or sitting on corporate boards have barely budged in the past decade.

Why has progress stalled? A recent study suggests the unlikeliest of reasons: the marriage structure of men in the workplace.

A group of researchers from several universities recently published a report on the attitudes and beliefs of employed men, which shows that those with wives who did not work outside the home or who worked part-time were more likely than those with wives who worked to: (1) have an unfavorable view about women in the workplace; (2)think workplaces run less smoothly with more women; (3) view workplaces with female leaders as less desirable; and (4) conside female candidates for promotion to be less qualified than comparable male colleagues.

The researchers also found that the men who exhibited resistance to women’s advancement were “more likely to populate the upper echelons of organizations and thus, occupy more powerful positions.”

Their conclusion? “Marriage structures play an important role in economic life beyond the four walls of the house.” They affect how people view gender roles and how they categorize others. And, as Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji has documented in her work, using the Implicit Association Test, this can happen even unconsciously.

So even if a male boss explicitly states — and believes — he supports women in leadership, he might still exhibit contradictory behavior or remain oblivious to the obstacles that female colleagues face. Indeed, according to this HBR Research Report from the Center for Work-Life Policy, only 28% of men, compared with 49% of women, see gender bias as still prevalent in the workplace.

I saw this in my own research for Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law. Many of the women partners I interviewed described a lack of support and sponsorship from key men in their firms. Several talked to male colleagues who admitted that the success of married women as equity partners invalidated the choices they and their wives had made about how to divide the responsibilities of work and family.

These biases are understandable. It’s natural to seek validation for the choices, and particularly the sacrifices, you have made. But when this expresses itself in attitudes and actions that make it difficult for talented individuals whose choices have been different to advance, it is critical for workplace leaders to intervene.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Nancy Gertner on the Situation of Feminism
• Judge Nancy Gertner on her Situation
• The Gendered Situation of Recommendation Letters
• The Double-Binded Situation of Even Women Lawyers
• Examining the Gendered Situation of Harvard Business School
• A Rose by any other Name Might Become a Judge
• Not Just Whistling Vivaldi
• The Nerdy, Gendered Situation of Computer Science
• The Situation of “Opting Out”
• The Gendered Situation of Science & Math
• The Situation of Sexism
• Sexual Harassment at Wal-Mart?
• Women’s Situation in Economics

The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates

From InMind (an outstanding article by Dr. Theresa DiDonato from a few years ago):

If your citizenship comes with the responsibility – and privilege – of voting, then every few years you face an interesting challenge. Who will you vote for? Whether you choose to support an incumbent, a celebrated war hero, an experienced government official, or a new face on the political scene, psychologists are incredibly curious about the process by which you come to that decision. There is reason to believe that, coming from a thoughtful and prepared voter, your ballot will reflect an objective assessment of candidate qualifications. You may, for example, use the time before an election to analyze debates, weigh social policies, and scrutinize performance records. With a wealth of political information at the tip of your fingers, only careful, deliberative thinking will contribute to your final decision…right?

Recent research in political psychology tells us that conscious deliberation is only part of the story when it comes to the voter-decision process. Information about candidates is further gathered using no mental effort, through processes operating completely outside of our awareness. Visual cues, for example, such as physical appearance, are instrumental in shaping our impressions of political candidates. Consider the case of Richard Nixon, a United States’ presidential hopeful back in September of 1960. Coming off of a hospital visit and sporting a five-o’clock shadow, Nixon participated in the first-ever televised presidential debate against John F. Kennedy, whose recent return from sunny California left him well-rested and tan. There is reason to believe that Nixon’s arguments were superior: radio listeners thought he won the debate. The estimated 70 million TV viewers, however, overwhelmingly preferred Kennedy. Visual information, i.e. Kennedy’s clean-cut confidence versus Nixon’s haggard appearance, is presumed to have influenced the TV viewers, ultimately shaping their global impressions of both candidates (Kraus, 1988).

Fast forward almost fifty years and researchers are just beginning to understand how physical appearance, particularly facial appearance, factors into voter choice. Nixon’s and Kennedy’s facial expression may certainly have evoked emotional reactions from television viewers during that critical debate. Accordingly, research suggests that feelings, like warmth or happiness, in response to a candidate’s facial gestures can influence voters’ attitudes and subsequent decisions (Sullivan & Masters, 1988). Of particular interest to social-cognitive researchers who study person-perception is how the mind translates facial appearance into beliefs about a candidate’s suitability for office. We now know that in the instant we see a person’s face, an array of fast and implicit cognitive processes take place. In that split second, we unconsciously construct ideas about a person’s personality (Bar, Neta & Linz, 2006). We may think a person is kind, strict, or honest, based only on his appearance. As you might imagine, because we make these personality inferences so easily, they can have important implications for a political candidate seeking election. Indeed, early research had found that a candidate’s photograph can communicate a clear image of his “congressional demeanor,” and fitness for office, affecting his voter appeal (Rosenberg, Bohan, McCafferty, & Harris, 1986). But what is it exactly about a politician’s face that influences his popularity? And which trait inferences matter when it comes to our voting decisions?

As most politicians know, people generally favor familiar faces over unfamiliar faces. What they may not be aware of is people also tend to prefer faces that are similar to their own. Such an idea is firmly grounded in evolutionary theory. Our faces tend to be similar to our family members’ faces, and we also generally share genetic material with them. The evolutionary perspective argues that we are fundamentally wired to protect and spread our genes, so it makes sense that we might be biologically-biased to prefer similar faces. Is this preference sufficiently ingrained so that we might actually prefer candidates who resemble us?

Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, and Collins (in press) used a creative method to test this idea. Building on their previous work (Bailenson, Garland, Iyengar, & Yee, 2006), they examined the influence of facial similarity on voting behavior by actually manipulating the degree of facial similarity between participants and candidates. How? By digitally morphing images of participants’ faces with photographs of current candidates! Essentially, they screened out participants with glasses and facial hair, and used only high-quality photographs. They then used a computer program to morph, or blend, participants’ faces into the faces of real-life United States’ politicians, such as Hillary Clinton. Participants were unaware of the image modifications.

The researchers conducted three experiments in which they showed participants candidate photos that had been morphed with themselves (self-morph) and/or with a random other participant (other-morph). In some cases, these images were of widely-known politicians, like John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani, while other times they were of unfamiliar candidates. Participants rated each candidate on a set of ten positive personality traits (i.e. moral, intelligent, and friendly), reported their party affiliation (Democrat or Republican), and indicated the strength of that affiliation. In the final experiment, participants also saw a brief description of the candidates’ positions on issues like the Iraq War along with their picture.

The intrigue and appeal of these findings are further enhanced by the researchers’ discovery that judgment speed mattered. They found that immediate, first impressions of competence, made after seeing an image for only 100 milliseconds, were superior to deliberative judgments in anticipating the winner of an election (Ballew & Todorov, 2007). This finding seems counterintuitive: how could gut feelings outperform reflective thinking? At the same time, it fits well with one research study focused not on candidate preferences, but on strawberry jam. Wilson and Schooler (1991) asked participants to taste and rate the quality of different jams, and then tested the “accuracy” of these ratings by comparing them with evaluations offered by trained tasting experts. Results showed that when participants were instructed to reflect on why they liked or disliked the jams, they produced ratings that did not corresponded with the experts’ ratings as well as those who simply rated the jams without reflection.

What is it about judging unfamiliar candidates and unfamiliar jams that champions intuition over careful reflection?

Find out and to read the rest of the superb article, here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Voting for a Face
• Botoxifying Empathy
• A Reminder: Smile
• Stereotyping Political Ideology
• The Situation of Smiling
• The Body Has a Mind of its Own,
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture,
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People,
• Interpreting Facial Expressions,
• Smile If You Love Your Future Relationships
• Can You Turn the World on With Your Smile?, and
• A Look Into the Way Culture Affects Facial Expression.

More posts on the situation of politics here.

The Racial Situation of 2012 Election

From University of Washington Newswire:

After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many proclaimed that the country had entered a post-racial era in which race was no longer an issue. However, a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year’s presidential election.

The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.

“People were saying that with Obama’s election race became a dead issue, but that’s not at all the case,” said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.

The study’s findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don’t believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.

“Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having ‘done the right thing’ then are now letting other considerations prevail,” said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.

In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled “automatic white preference” on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.

In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.

The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.

In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how “warmly” they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls – Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum – as well as Obama.

Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don’t realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents’ racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study’s finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.

“The study’s findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?” Greenwald said.

He suspects that Obama’s power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have “brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008.”

Another possibility is that Republican candidates’ assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency “may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people’s attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters’ comparisons of Romney with Obama.

They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of the Voting Booth
• The Informational Situation of Voters
• Reporting Social Facts vs. Pining for Jim Crow: No Comparison Between Reid and Lott
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race
• The Situation of Pollworkers and Voting Booths – Abstract
• The Racial Situation of Voting
• The Interior Situation of Undecided Voters
• On Being a Mindful Voter
• Implicit Associations in the 2008 Presidential Election
• The Situation of Political Animals
  
• Your Brain on Politics.

Racism is Still on the Table

From CBS Charlotte:

A study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University found that approximately 40 percent of wait staff decide how they are going to treat patrons based on their race.

The official study, “‘Because They Tip for S***!’: The Social Psychology of Everyday Racism in Restaurants,” and its controversial findings garnered national attention when they were published recently in the Journal of Black Studies.

Their collected data showed that 38.5 percent of servers said that race influenced their approach to waiting on patrons, and that 52.8 percent of servers saw co-workers engaging in discriminatory behavior through poor service.

Researchers were motivated by the potential to further discourse about a form of racism not frequently discussed, especially in a society described by some as “post-racial.”

“[We] were interested in studying tableside racism, or ‘dining while black,’ because of the continuing prevalence of subtle discrimination against African-Americans in everyday situations,” PhD candidate Sarah Nell Rusche told CBS Charlotte via e-mail. “Other forms of racial profiling … have been well documented and we wanted to further understandings of these forms of discrimination.”

 Surveys were administered by Rusche and the study’s co-author, Zachary W. Brewster, to 200 servers working at 18 full-service chain restaurants throughout the state during the summer and fall of 2004.

The study also chronicled the races waiters’ and waitresses’ sentiments regarding the most and least ideal races to serve, in addition to noting how a patron’s race may influence their behavior.

Those findings were consistent with the overall reported bias against black patrons – a reported 64.7 percent of waiters asked named whites as the most ideal race to serve, while 54.6 percent said African-Americans were the least ideal.

Rusche added that a significant contributing factor to such behavior was the stigma against African-Americans labeling them as bad tippers – a gesture sometimes meant to be indicative of inferior service, and what the study calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“[T]here is widespread belief among restaurant waitstaff that African-American customers are poor tippers,” she explained of the findings. “Since the bulk of servers’ income is from tips, many servers feel that prejudicial service based on perceived tip (which is also a race-based perception) is economically justifiable.”

Rusche suggested that restaurants looking to create an environment free of racial prejudices should take care to curb any speech or activity that may foster such sentiments.

“One thing our research shows is that workplace discourse frequently involves racist comments and discussions of customers’ race, including the use of code words meant to avoid overt bigotry,” Rusche observed. “So instead of recommending how establishments can avoid hiring racist individuals, I would recommend that they work to minimize the prevalence of racist workplace discourse that fosters these sentiments.”

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Racial Stereotyping and Alcohol
• The Situation of Prejudice: Us vs. Them? or Them Is Us?
• The ‘Turban Effect’
• The Situation of Racial Profiling
• Do We Miss Racial Stereotypes Today that Will Be Evident Tomorrow?
• Race, Guns, and the Danger of Private Law Enforcement
• The Psychology of Guns and Race
• The Pretense of Colorblindness
• Colorblind? Really?
• Color Conscious Situation of Neighborhood Choice
• Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract
• Colorblinded Wages - Abstract

The Costs of Living in a Material World

Are “material girls” born or bred?

In four new experiments, Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen and his colleagues Monika A. Bauer, James E. B. Wilkie, and Jung K. Kim shed some light on this question.

Here is the abstract of the paper, forthcoming in Psychological Science:

Correlational evidence indicates that materialistic individuals experience relatively low levels of well-being. Across four experiments, we found that situational cuing can also trigger materialistic mind-sets, with similarly negative personal and social consequences. Merely viewing desirable consumer goods resulted in increases in materialistic concerns and led to heightened negative affect and reduced social involvement (Experiment 1). Framing a computer task as a “Consumer Reaction Study” led to a stronger automatic bias toward values reflecting self-enhancement, compared with framing the same task as a “Citizen Reaction Study” (Experiment 2). Consumer cues also increased competitiveness (Experiment 3) and selfishness in a water-conservation dilemma (Experiment 4). Thus, the costs of materialism are not localized only in particularly materialistic people, but can also be found in individuals who happen to be exposed to environmental cues that activate consumerism-cues that are commonplace in contemporary society.

Related Situationist posts:

• Some Reflections on Reflections
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• Law, Competition, Self-Interest
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Objectification
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

Homophobia = Self-phobia?

From University of Rochester:

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author.

“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” adds co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who helped direct the research.

The paper includes four separate experiments, conducted in the United States and Germany, with each study involving an average of 160 college students. The findings provide new empirical evidence to support the psychoanalytic theory that the fear, anxiety, and aversion that some seemingly heterosexual people hold toward gays and lesbians can grow out of their own repressed same-sex desires, Ryan says. The results also support the more modern self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester, which links controlling parenting to poorer self-acceptance and difficulty valuing oneself unconditionally.

The findings may help to explain the personal dynamics behind some bullying and hate crimes directed at gays and lesbians, the authors argue. Media coverage of gay-related hate crimes suggests that attackers often perceive some level of threat from homosexuals. People in denial about their sexual orientation may lash out because gay targets threaten and bring this internal conflict to the forefront, the authors write.

The research also sheds light on high profile cases in which anti-gay public figures are caught engaging in same-sex sexual acts. The authors write that this dynamic of inner conflict may be reflected in such examples as Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who opposed gay marriage but was exposed in a gay sex scandal in 2006, and Glenn Murphy, Jr., former chairman of the Young Republican National Federation and vocal opponent of gay marriage, who was accused of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old man in 2007.

“We laugh at or make fun of such blatant hypocrisy, but in a real way, these people may often themselves be victims of repression and experience exaggerated feelings of threat,” says Ryan. “Homophobia is not a laughing matter. It can sometimes have tragic consequences,” Ryan says, pointing to cases such as the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard or the 2011 shooting of Larry King.

To explore participants’ explicit and implicit sexual attraction, the researchers measured the discrepancies between what people say about their sexual orientation and how they react during a split-second timed task. Students were shown words and pictures on a computer screen and asked to put these in “gay” or “straight” categories. Before each of the 50 trials, participants were subliminally primed with either the word “me” or “others” flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds. They were then shown the words “gay,” “straight,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual” as well as pictures of straight and gay couples, and the computer tracked precisely their response times. A faster association of “me” with “gay” and a slower association of “me” with “straight” indicated an implicit gay orientation.

A second experiment, in which subjects were free to browse same-sex or opposite-sex photos, provided an additional measure of implicit sexual attraction.

Through a series of questionnaires, participants also reported on the type of parenting they experienced growing up, from authoritarian to democratic. Students were asked to agree or disagree with statements like: “I felt controlled and pressured in certain ways,” and “I felt free to be who I am.” For gauging the level of homophobia in a household, subjects responded to items like: “It would be upsetting for my mom to find out she was alone with a lesbian” or “My dad avoids gay men whenever possible.”

Finally, the researcher measured participants’ level of homophobia – both overt, as expressed in questionnaires on social policy and beliefs, and implicit, as revealed in word-completion tasks. In the latter, students wrote down the first three words that came to mind, for example for the prompt “k i _ _”. The study tracked the increase in the amount of aggressive words elicited after subliminally priming subjects with the word “gay” for 35 milliseconds.

Across all the studies, participants with supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation, while participants from authoritarian homes revealed the most discrepancy between explicit and implicit attraction.

“In a predominately heterosexual society, ‘know thyself’ can be a challenge for many gay individuals. But in controlling and homophobic homes, embracing a minority sexual orientation can be terrifying,” explains Weinstein. These individuals risk losing the love and approval of their parents if they admit to same sex attractions, so many people deny or repress that part of themselves, she said.

In addition, participants who reported themselves to be more heterosexual than their performance on the reaction time task indicated were most likely to react with hostility to gay others, the studies showed. That incongruence between implicit and explicit measures of sexual orientation predicted a variety of homophobic behaviors, including self-reported anti-gay attitudes, implicit hostility towards gays, endorsement of anti-gay policies, and discriminatory bias such as the assignment of harsher punishments for homosexuals, the authors conclude.

“This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, ‘Why?’” says Ryan. “Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection.”

The study had several limitations, the authors write. All participants were college students, so it may be helpful in future research to test these effects in younger adolescents still living at home and in older adults who have had more time to establish lives independent of their parents and to look at attitudes as they change over time.

Other contributors to the paper include Cody DeHaan and Nicole Legate from the University of Rochester, Andrew Przybylski from the University of Essex, and William Ryan from the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Connection Between Homophobia and Homosexual Arousal
• Dr. Robert Trivers at Harvard Law – Thursday
• The Color of Sex Appeal
• Your Brain and Morality
• Memory Biases as Source of Prejudice
• David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Jon Ensign, Mark Sanford, Chris Lee, and Now Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner: The Disposition Is Weaker than the Situation
• The Situation of Narcissism in PoliticsThe Situation of Temptation

The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status

From University of California Berkeley:

The upper class has a higher propensity for unethical behavior, being more likely to believe – as did Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street” – that “greed is good,” according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley.

In seven separate studies conducted on the UC Berkeley campus, in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationwide, UC Berkeley researchers consistently found that upper-class participants were more likely to lie and cheat when gambling or negotiating; cut people off when driving, and endorse unethical behavior in the workplace.

“The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed,” said Paul Piff, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (Monday, Feb. 27) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Piff’s study is the latest in a series of UC Berkeley scholarly investigations into the relationship between socio-economic class and prosocial and antisocial emotions and behaviors, revealing new information about class differences during a time of rising economic tension.

“As these issues come to the fore, our research – and that by others – helps shed light on the role of inequality in shaping patterns of ethical conduct and selfish behavior, and points to certain ways in which these patterns might also be changed,” Piff said.

To investigate how class relates to ethical conduct, the researchers surveyed the ethical tendencies of more than 1,000 individuals of lower-, middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Volunteers reported their social class using the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Socioeconomic Status and filled out surveys revealing their attitudes about unprincipled behaviors and greed. They also took part in tasks designed to measure their actual unethical behavior.

In two field studies on driving behavior, upper-class motorists were found to be four times more likely than the other drivers to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection and three times more likely to cut off a pedestrian waiting to enter a crosswalk. Another study found that upper-class participants presented with scenarios of unscrupulous behavior were more likely than the individuals in the other socio-economic classes to report replicating this type of behavior themselves.

Participants in the fourth study were assigned tasks in a laboratory where a jar of candy, reserved for visiting children, was on hand, and were invited to take a candy or two. Upper-class participants helped themselves to twice as much candy as did their counterparts in other classes.

In the fifth study, participants each were assigned the role of an employer negotiating a salary with a job candidate seeking long-term employment. Among other things, they were told that the job would soon be eliminated, and that they were free to convey that information to the candidate. Upper-class participants were more likely to deceive job candidates by withholding this information, the study found.

In the sixth study, participants played a computerized dice game, with each player getting five rolls of the dice and then reporting his or her scores. The player with the highest score would receive a cash prize. The players did not know that the game was rigged so that each player would receive no more than 12 points for the five rolls. Upper-class participants were more likely to report higher scores than would be possible, indicating a higher rate of cheating, according to the study.

The last study found attitudes about greed to be the most significant predictor of unethical behavior. Participants were primed to think about the advantages of greed and then presented with bad behavior-in-the-workplace scenarios, such as stealing cash, accepting bribes and overcharging customers. It turned out that even those participants not in the upper class were just as likely to report a willingness to engage in unethical behavior as the upper-class cohort once they had been primed to see the benefits of greed, researchers said.

“These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behavior, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies,” Piff said of the cumulative findings.

Paper: “High social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, PNAS (2012). (link)

NPR Marketplace Story on Paper.

Related Situationist posts:

• Susan Fiske’s New Book
• Perceptions of Income Distribution and Preferences for Redistribution,
• Psychology of Inequality
• Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly
• A Discussion about (In)Equality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• Botoxifying Empathy
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Enclothed Cognition
• The Embodied Situation of Power
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture
• The Low-Status Situation of Corrupting Power
• The Situational Power of Anonymity
• Shocking for Money
• Alone Together – The Commuter’s Situation

The Situation of the Voting Booth

Stanford University Press Release (2008):

What would you say influenced your voting decisions in the most recent local or national election? Political preferences? A candidate’s stance on a particular issue? The repercussions of a proposition on your economic well-being? All these “rational” factors influence voting, and peoples’ ability to vote, based on what is best for them, is a hallmark of the democratic process.

But Stanford Graduate School of Business researchers, doctoral graduates Jonah Berger and Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler, associate professor of marketing, conclude that a much more subtle and arbitrary factor may also play a role—the particular type of polling location in which you happen to vote.

It’s hard to imagine that something as innocuous as polling location (e.g., school, church, or fire station) might actually influence voting behavior, but the Stanford researchers have discovered just that. In fact, Wheeler says “the influence of polling location on voting found in our research would be more than enough to change the outcome of a close election.” And, as seen in the neck-to-neck 2000 presidential election where Al Gore ultimately lost to George W. Bush after months of vote counting in Florida, election biases such as polling location could play a significant role in the 2008 presidential election. Even at the proposition level, “Voting at a school could increase support for school spending or voting at a church could decrease support for stem cell initiatives,” says Wheeler.

Why might something like polling location influence voting behavior? “Environmental cues, such as objects or places, can activate related constructs within individuals and influence the way they behave,” says Berger. now an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton school. “Voting in a school, for example, could activate the part of a person’s identity that cares about kids, or norms about taking care of the community. Similarly, voting in a church could activate norms of following church doctrine. Such effects may even occur outside an individual’s awareness.”

Using data from Arizona’s 2000 general election, Berger, Meredith, a visiting lecturer at MIT, and Wheeler discovered that people who voted in schools were more likely to support raising the state sales tax to fund education. The researchers focused on Proposition 301, which proposed raising the state sales tax from 5.0 percent to 5.6 percent to increase education spending. What they found was that voters were more likely to support this initiative if they voted in a school versus other types of polling locations (55.0 percent versus 53.09 percent).

This effect persisted even when the researchers controlled for—or removed the possibility of—other factors such as:

Where voters lived. People who have kids may be pro-education and more likely to live near, and hence vote at, schools; Political views. Those who voted for Gore or positively on other propositions; and Demographics including age, sex, etc.

In regards to the first control, for example, people were still more likely to support Proposition 301 if they had voted in schools than if they had voted in places that were not schools but had schools nearby. No matter how they cut and spliced the data, the researchers found that voters in schools were more likely to support Proposition 301.

“We want factors like political views—whether someone thinks a candidate is going to make our country a better place—to sway elections,” said Berger. “But in forming election policy, we also want to make sure that arbitrary factors such as polling location don’t ultimately influence voting behaviors.”

To further test their hypothesis, the researchers even conducted the same analysis for the other 13 propositions on the Arizona ballot. They reasoned that if voters who cast their ballots in schools were more likely to vote positively for other unrelated propositions on wildlife or property taxes, for example, then the researchers would know that their model was not adequately accounting for some other factor beyond polling location, and that something such as voting preferences was having an effect. But such additional testing only supported the researchers’ hypotheses further.

The researchers also followed up with a lab experiment that allowed for random assignment of voters to pictures of different voting environments that the researchers thought might influence voting behavior. Participants were shown 10 images from well-maintained schools (e.g. lockers, classrooms) or churches (e.g. pews, alters), plus five additional filler images of generic buildings. A control group was shown images of generic buildings.

The participants then voted on a number of initiatives including California’s 2004 stem cell funding initiative, Arizona’s education initiative, and several others. Initiative wording was taken right from each state’s legislative council documents. As predicted by Berger, Meredith, and Wheeler: Environmental cues contained in the photos influenced voting.

Results from the second study showed that participants were less likely to support the stem cell initiative if they were shown church images than if they were shown school images or a generic photo of a building. The subjects also were more likely to support the education initiative if they were shown school images versus church or generic building images. The results further demonstrated that environmental cues present in different polling locations can influence voting outcomes, even when voters are randomly assigned to different environmental cue conditions.

“What our research suggests is that it might be useful to further investigate influences such as polling location to better understand how such factors affect different types of voting situations. From a policy perspective, the hope is that a voting location assignment could be less arbitrary and more determined in order to avoid undue biases in the future,” says Wheeler.

(pdf here.)

From USA Today (2012):

University of Maine psychology professor Jordan LaBouff and co-author Wade Rowatt, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor, have a new paper out in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, finding that people expressed “cold” rather than “warm” attitudes toward gay men and women if they were asked their views while they were within sight of a church.

The research, conducted in England and the Netherlands with participants of 20 different nationalities, found that the unmentioned but evident visual cue of a church prompted people to express more conservative views on a range of issues — foreign aid, immigration, protection of the environment, separation of church and state, and more.

LaBouff said Thursday, “The effect is not specific to Christianity, but the sight of a church highlights our internal boundaries — who is like us and who is not like us. And we are more negative toward people who are not like us, whether we are religious or not.”

Related Situationist posts:

• The Informational Situation of Voters
• Reporting Social Facts vs. Pining for Jim Crow: No Comparison Between Reid and Lott
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race
• The Situation of Pollworkers and Voting Booths – Abstract
• The Racial Situation of Voting
• The Interior Situation of Undecided Voters
• On Being a Mindful Voter
• Implicit Associations in the 2008 Presidential Election
• The Situation of Political Animals
  
• Your Brain on Politics.

Implicit Bias in the Courtroom

Situationist Contributor Jerry Kang and his numerous co-authors, Mark Bennett, Devon Carbado, Pamela Casey, Nilanjana Dasgupta, David Faigman, Rachel Godsil, Anthony Greenwald, Justin Levinson, and Jennifer Mnookin, have just posted their important paper, “Implicit Bias in the Courtroom” (forthcoming UCLA Law Review, Vol. 59, No. 5, 2012) on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

Given the substantial and growing scientific literature on implicit bias, the time has now come to confront a critical question: What, if anything, should we do about implicit bias in the courtroom? The author team comprises legal academics, scientists, researchers, and even a sitting federal judge who seek to answer this question in accordance with “behavioral realism.” The Article first provides a succinct scientific introduction to implicit bias, with some important theoretical clarifications that distinguish between explicit, implicit, and structural forms of bias. Next, the article applies the science to two trajectories of bias relevant to the courtroom. One story follows a criminal defendant path; the other story follows a civil employment discrimination path. This application involves not only a focused scientific review but also a step-by-step examination of how criminal and civil trials proceed. Finally, the Article examines various concrete intervention strategies to counter implicit biases for key players in the justice system, such as the judge and jury.

Download paper for free.

Related Situationist posts:

• Implicit Bias Symposium (with links to videos)
• The Situation of ‘Common Sense’
• Pushback from the Left
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• Perceptions of Racial Divide
• Black History is Now
• Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” - Video
• The Situation of Litigators
• Tierney’s Skepticism at the New York Times
• Measuring Implicit Attitudes
• What Are the Legal Implications of Implicit Biases?
• Confronting the Backlash against Implicit Bias
• Legal Academic Backlash - Abstract
• Naïve Cynicism in Election 2008: Dispositionism v. Situationism?
• Implicit Bias and Strawmen
• The Situation of Situation in Employment Discrimination Law – Abstract.”

Justice for Trayvon

For The Situationist, Sabreena El-Amin (Harvard Law School student and President of the Student Association for Law and Mind Sciences (SALMS)), has authored the following legal analysis of the Trayvon Martin shooting and situationist analysis of the “stand your ground” doctrine.  We are pleased to publish it and look forward to more contributions from Sabreena and other members of SALMS.

The Trayvon Martin incident is of particular importance to me: not only as a Black person, not only as a law student, not only as a mother, but as a big sister. My younger brother is currently attending school at Barry University in Miami, Florida. He, like myself, loves Arizona Ice Tea. We are also both big fans of Skittles, though we have a particular preference for the sour kind. Most importantly, we both wear hoodies. I am now more nervous than ever for my brother: a 19-year-old black man walking the streets of Miami with a camera. With laws like the “Stand your Ground” statute, vigilantes like Zimmerman are free to roam the streets in Florida, singling out young black men and killing them seemingly without repercussions.

My argument will focus on two main points: 1) Zimmerman should have been arrested as the prosecution will likely be able to meet their burden of proof that his action was not in accordance with the statute; and 2) the Stand Your Ground statute should be repealed because a) it encourages armed individuals to respond to situations violently and b) it sanctions the attack of Blacks.  I will begin the article by outlining the facts as I know them. I understand that there are several different fact patterns floating around and the story is being developed daily. My arguments will be based solely on the facts mapped out below. I will continue by discussing why the facts would support the prosecution’s case, if one were to be brought, focusing mainly on a piece by Governor Granholm of Michigan. I will then go on to discuss the “Stand Your Ground” statute based on two psychological studies that show the statute endorses more violence than is reasonably necessary.

Facts*

Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black male, was walking to his father’s home in a gated community in Sanford, FL after returning from a 7-Eleven convenience store. En route, 28-year-old self-appointed Neighborhood Watchman, George Zimmerman, spotted Trayvon and telephoned police that there was a suspicious young black man walking around. Zimmerman informed the police that the young man looked like he was on drugs and appeared to be reaching for something in his waistband. Initially Zimmerman claimed that the young man was coming right at him, and then that Trayvon was getting away. Zimmerman complained that “they” always get away. Dispatcher informed Zimmerman that they did not need him to follow Trayvon and Zimmerman said okay. Several residents of the area called in shortly after Zimmerman’s call to report that they heard screaming. In some cases, callers reported a black male lying on the ground. Each caller also heard gun shots and heard the screaming stop. One caller reported that there was a man in a white shirt on top of someone lying on the ground.

Police collected Trayvon’s body, tested him for drugs, ran a background check, labeled him John Doe and placed him in the morgue where he would lie for over 24 hours before he was identified. Trayvon was unarmed and in fact only had a can of Arizona Ice Tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman was questioned after the shooting, but never arrested. Zimmerman weighed 250 pounds and had a history of vigilantism.

Zimmerman claims that he shot Trayvon in self defense. Florida has a statute (Fla. Stat. § 776.013, also called the “Stand Your Ground” statute) which states (in relevant part):

(1) A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force was used was in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle, or if that person had removed or was attempting to remove another against that person’s will from the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle; and

(b) The person who uses defensive force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry or unlawful and forcible act was occurring or had occurred.

(2) The presumption set forth in subsection (1) does not apply if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force is used has the right to be in or is a lawful resident of the dwelling, residence, or vehicle, such as an owner, lessee, or titleholder, and there is not an injunction for protection from domestic violence or a written pretrial supervision order of no contact against that person; or

(b) The person or persons sought to be removed is a child or grandchild, or is otherwise in the lawful custody or under the lawful guardianship of, the person against whom the defensive force is used; or

(c) The person who uses defensive force is engaged in an unlawful activity or is using the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle to further an unlawful activity; or

(d) The person against whom the defensive force is used is a law enforcement officer, as defined in s. 943.10(14), who enters or attempts to enter a dwelling, residence, or vehicle in the performance of his or her official duties and the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person entering or attempting to enter was a law enforcement officer.

(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

Zimmerman’s claims he was justified in his use of force based on this statute. It is not clear which clause Zimmerman’s defense is connected to.

Zimmerman has, since the incident, secured legal counsel. Zimmerman’s lawyer asserts that Zimmerman is not a racist and that he in fact mentors Blacks. His lawyer also stated that Zimmerman is currently in hiding, but has not fled the country. According to Zimmerman’s father, Zimmerman identifies as Hispanic.

Currently, Florida Governor Jed Bush does not believe Zimmerman’s actions are covered by the statute. There is a Department of Justice investigation in regards to the failure of the Sanford Police Department to arrest Zimmerman, President Obama has called for justice for Trayvon, and Sanford’s chief of police has stepped down. People across the country are expressing their distaste for the response to Trayvon’s murder and are, via protest, Facebook, articles, etc., calling for “Justice for Trayvon”.

Justice for Trayvon: Bringing Charges against Zimmerman

The “Stand Your Ground” statute essentially creates a presumption of self-defense in certain situations. Zimmerman has yet to be arrested because authorities do not believe there is enough evidence to rebut this presumption. I would like to focus this aspect of my piece on the following arguments: a) the facts of the case do not support a claim of self defense alleged pursuant to Fla. Stat. § 776.013(3) as Zimmerman appears to have been the attacker and not the victim, and b) the facts of the case do not support a claim of self defense pursuant to Fla. Stat. § 776.013(1) as Trayvon was unarmed and Zimmerman was likely acting unlawfully in his pursuit of Trayvon by misleading officials. Admittedly, only Zimmerman knows exactly what transpired during his altercation with Martin, and thus this argument may be moot after Zimmerman’s account becomes public.

Section 3 of the “Stand Your Ground” statute allows someone who is being attacked to respond with force and does not require them to first attempt to flee. Under a possible account of the facts, Zimmerman’s actions were self defense because he was attacked by Trayvon. Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm wrote a piece on March 21, 2012 outlining several reasons why this account is unsupported by the facts as publicly known. In her piece Governor Granholm discusses five key pieces of evidence which refute Zimmerman’s claim:

• 1.The call from Zimmerman to law enforcement, and the officers telling Martin not to pursue. Zimmerman whispers what many have described as a racial slur under his breath.
• 2.There is a 911 call where you can hear a voice yelling for help and a firearm shot.
• 3.Trayvon’s father identified his voice on that 911 call on Al Sharpton’s Politics Nation program on MSNBC.
• 4.The account of the girlfriend, who says Trayvon told her by cellphone that he was being followed.
• 5.Trayvon was not armed and weighed between 75-100 pounds less than Zimmerman.

The evidence that we know of — the public evidence — establishes that Zimmerman was the pursuer, and not the victim.

In addition to this evidence, a 9-11 caller reported a man in a white shirt on top of a man lying on the ground. Another caller reported a man lying on the ground screaming “Help” and hearing gun shots go off before he got the chance to go to the man for help. Trayvon’s parents have identified this voice as their sons on the tape. Zimmerman, however, claims that this is his voice, but in connection with the other evidence (e.g., that he was the heavier of the two and that Trayvon was unarmed), this will likely be refuted. Based on the facts as alleged, the situation seems to have been initiated by Zimmerman. Even if Trayvon fought back after being pursued, his actions were justified based on the same statute that Zimmerman is currently hiding under.

Section 1 of the “Stand Your Ground” statute creates a presumption of self defense if a person is doing something unlawful and the person using force knows or reasonably believes that an unlawful act is occurring or about to occur. There has been some discussion at my law school that if Zimmerman asserts that he witnessed Trayvon about to break into someone’s home then Zimmerman may likely have a claim. I think this is unlikely for two reasons. First, Trayvon was unarmed and, based on all available evidence, innocently walking home from the convenience store. In order for the presumption in section 1 to be triggered, the attacked must have been in the process of committing certain crimes. There has been no evidence advanced indicating that Trayvon was participating in any crime. In fact the evidence points to Trayvon being engaged in innocent activity. Second, section (2)(c) asserts that this presumption is unavailable if the attacker is engaged in an unlawful activity at the time of the attack. As the 911 tape shows, Zimmerman was told not to follow Trayvon and said “okay.” This act can be seen as misleading police officers, who were likely told by dispatch that Zimmerman would be waiting for them to arrive before doing anything further. This act is likely in violation of Fla. Stat. § 843.06, which makes the “neglect or refusal to aid peace officers” “in the preservation of the peace” unlawful. Zimmerman’s false compliance with the order may have delayed the response time of the dispatched officers and been the reason why the police were unable to respond to Zimmerman’s call in time to save Trayvon’s life. Arguably, Zimmerman’s actions show  neglect to assist a peace officer and thus could qualify as unlawful acts that will exclude Zimmerman from the protection of Fla. Stat. § 776.013(1).

Justice for Blacks in Florida: Repeal the Stand Your Ground Statute

I would like to start this section by clarifying two points. First, Florida is not the only state to have a version of the “Stand Your Ground” statute. According to the above-mentioned piece by Gov. Granholm, who describes the statute as “part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)’s cluster of pro-NRA bills that shot through legislatures in the past few years”, Florida is only one of 17 states to have a statute of this kind. Secondly, studies suggest that it is very possible for Zimmerman to be a rational, tolerant, even intelligent, person and still to have reacted in the manner that he did. Many people have labeled Zimmerman a racist and even called him sadistic for his response to an innocent young boy. Sadly, while this may be true for Zimmerman, it does not have to be. Due to the freedom that this law opens up for people to act upon their fears, which may be based on their predisposition to certain opinions, I believe this law should be repealed immediately. Every minute that this law and laws like it remain on the books another Black person’s life is in jeopardy.

Guns Breed Violence

In a piece entitled “Holding a Gun Influences You to Think Others are Armed,” David DiSalvo discusses psychological research that suggests Zimmerman may have reasonably believed that Trayvon was armed. As the title of the piece indicates, James Brockholm’s study, which will be published in the upcoming edition of Journal of Experimental Psychology, supports the idea that the possession of a gun will influence your opinion of whether those around you are armed. Brockholm’s conclusion is that a person’s ability to act upon certain impulses can “bias their recognition of objects… in dramatic ways.” In the study, individuals holding toy guns were more likely to believe a person had a gun than those who were holding a ball and who simply had guns in the room, but not in their hand. The article describes this as the “blending of perception and action representations” which cause those holding guns to believe others are too.

The statute and others like it (e.g. Wisconson’s Castle Doctrine under which a homeowner recently shot and killed 20-year-old, unarmed Bo Morrison, without being charged) is meant to provide a means for people to protect themselves when actually threatened. Based on Brockholm’s research, the statute is actually allowing people to act upon perceived threat that is automatically enhanced by their ability to act against the threat. This research supports the idea that individuals with guns are likely to act frequently because they can act, and not because there is an actually threat. In Bo’s case, his hands were both in the air. In Trayvon’s case, he was walking with a cell phone, an Arizona Ice Tea, and Skittles. Neither youth was armed. Neither was attempting to harm anyone. But two lives are lost, and importantly, two men have taken a life because they were able to, not because they had to. These statutes encourage violence by giving gun holders the right and encouraging them to “meet force with force” when the force they perceive will always be equal to the force they are capable of exerting themselves. These types of laws should be repealed immediately in order to prevent more innocent people from losing their lives and others from taking lives.

People Focus on Blacks when on the Look-out for Criminal Activity

Recently, I took a photograph with some of my Black classmates at Harvard Law School. We wore hoodies and held signs asking “Do we look suspicious?” Unfortunately, research completed by Jennifer Eberhardt, Valerie Purdie, Phillip Goff, and Paul Daves in 2005 concludes that for many people the answer to that question is yes. “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing” asserts that stereotypes are bidirectional. The article states:

the mere presence of a Black man…can trigger thoughts that he is violent and criminal. Simply thinking about a Black person renders these concepts more accessible and can lead to misremember the Black person as the one holding the razor. Merely thinking about Blacks can lead people to evaluate ambiguous behavior as aggressive, to mis-categorize harmless objects as weapons, or to shoot quickly . . . .

The studies show that not only does thinking about Blacks make people think of crime, but thinking about crime makes people think of Blacks. These studies were intentionally done with both civilians and police officers. The officers were as susceptible to this association. Importantly, the study showed that when one is told to look out for crime, their visual attention focuses on Black faces. They may thus unconsciously avoid criminal activity of non-Black actors. For instance, when experimenters asked police officers “Who looks criminal?,” the officers choose Black faces more often than White faces. The study makes it clear that racial animus is not required. The association is automatic and is even sparked in Blacks and others minorities.

Based on this research, Zimmerman may have associated Trayvon with criminality without having any negative opinions of Blacks. As a neighborhood watchman put on guard to look out for crime, he was likely looking for Blacks. Zimmerman was attempting to crack down on several robberies that had occurred in his neighborhood, and the possibility of criminal activity was salient in his mind, when Trayvon walked innocently by. Zimmerman may have reasonably believed that Trayvon was about to engage in unlawful behavior, but this belief was based on stereotypes and not supported by what was actually occurring. Section 1 of the statute protects people who seek out criminals and prevent their crimes from being completed. As people often unconsciously associate African Americans with crime, they may seek out African Americans engaging in ambiguous behavior percieve it as criminal. Acting upon this perception, they may attack (as Zimmerman did), under the protective shield of the Stand Your Ground Statute, leading to the harm of either themselves or innocent individuals. Based on this research it is clear that the first section of the statute puts a target on Blacks.

Implications

The implications of the research that I have outlined in this section are that people who carry guns and seek out criminal activity will be searching for Blacks and will automatically associate ambiguous behavior with criminal activity. Laws like the “Stand Your Ground” statute give these individuals the right to act upon their perception and harm these Black people regardless of what they are doing. This means that Blacks in such situations will likely have no control over being shot or attacked. Even worse it means that individuals will be searching for Blacks and may unconsciously overlook true criminal activity in an attempt to find images that support their perception. We should not provide support for individuals to act upon irrational conclusions that are not supported by the circumstances. This does not mean that there should be no protection of individuals who respond reasonably to imminent danger, but we should require their perception to be supported by fact and not stereotype and thus require them to be able to connect their fear to something more than the person’s race. We should deem this on a case by case and remove the blanket approval of such behavior. People should be instructed to call police when observing unlawful behavior or to attempt to retreat when in fear of being attacked. Thus the statute should be repealed and self-defense should return to being a defense of murder, and not a presumption of innocence that must be rebutted.

Conclusion

What happened to Trayvon Martin is an all too familiar story to many Blacks. We are profiled regularly based on stereotypes that we have no control over. As many of us mourn Trayvon’s death and remember many of our other brothers and sisters who have fallen victim to racial stereotyping, there is a concurrent legal movement attempting to shed some hope on the issue by bringing charges against Zimmerman. This movement should also focus on repealing the Florida statute. Once these actions are taken, we will be one step closer to Justice for Trayvon.

*I would like to thank Anisha Queen, David Korn, James Smith, and Professor Jon Hanson for their assistance and inspiration with this piece.

** The facts have been compiled from the following articles:

• http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/03/24/lawyer-advising-trayvons-killer-denies-racism-as-prosecutor-vows-were-going-to/
• http://www.craigboyce.com/w/2012/03/trayvon-martin-shooting-911-call/
• http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/03/why_george_zimmerman_trayvon_martin_s_killer_hasn_t_been_prosecuted_.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-m-granholm/5-reasons-zimmermans-stan_b_1371554.html

Related Situationist posts:

• New Research on the Dangers of Private Law Enforcement
• Race, Guns, and the Danger of Private Law Enforcement
• If Guns Don’t Kill People, Sometimes Gun-Saturated Situations Do
• The Psychology of Guns and Race
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• He’s a Banana-Eating Monkey, but I’m Not a Racist
• Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” - Video
• A Situationist Considers the Implications of Simpson Sentencing
• The Situation of Handguns on Urban Streets-Abstract
• The Situation of First-Person Shooters
• Guilt and Racial Prejudice
• Perceptions of Racial Divide
• Banaji & Greenwald on Edge – Part IV

Image from Flickr.

New Research on the Dangers of Private Law Enforcement

In my last post on the Trayvon Martin shooting, I suggested that the dispositionist narratives being offered by many in the media might be missing the real story of why this tragedy happened.  Indeed, it might come down to “a toxic combination of negative stereotypes (linking blacks and crime) and a culture increasingly encouraging private law enforcement.”  (The focus of this law review article.)

This suggests that the debate taking place over the case perhaps ought to be shifted to the implicit biases of private citizens engaged in “policing” activities.  To this end, I thought it was worth introducing some fascinating new research by Jessica Witt and James Brockmole to be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.  According to a Notre Dame press release focused on the paper,

Wielding a gun increases a person’s bias to see guns in the hands of others, new research from the University of Notre Dame shows.

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. . . .

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In five experiments, subjects were shown multiple images of people on a computer screen and determined whether the person was holding a gun or a neutral object such as a soda can or cell phone. Subjects did this while holding either a toy gun or a neutral object such as a foam ball.

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The researchers varied the situation in each experiment — such as having the people in the images sometimes wear ski masks, changing the race of the person in the image or changing the reaction subjects were to have when they perceived the person in the image to hold a gun. Regardless of the situation the observers found themselves in, the study showed that responding with a gun biased observers to report “gun present” more than did responding with a ball. Thus, by virtue of affording the subject the opportunity to use a gun, he or she was more likely to classify objects in a scene as a gun and, as a result, to engage in threat-induced behavior, such as raising a firearm to shoot.

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“Beliefs, expectations and emotions can all influence an observer’s ability to detect and to categorize objects as guns,” Brockmole says. “Now we know that a person’s ability to act in certain ways can bias their recognition of objects as well, and in dramatic ways. It seems that people have a hard time separating their thoughts about what they perceive and their thoughts about how they can or should act.”

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The researchers showed that the ability to act is a key factor in the effects by showing that simply letting observers see a nearby gun did not influence their behavior; holding and using the gun was important.

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“One reason we supposed that wielding a firearm might influence object categorization stems from previous research in this area, which argues that people perceive the spatial properties of their surrounding environment in terms of their ability to perform an intended action,” Brockmole says.

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For example, other research has shown that people with broader shoulders tend to perceive doorways to be narrower, and softball players with higher batting averages perceive the ball to be bigger. The blending of perception and action representations could explain, in part, why people holding a gun would tend to assume others are, too.

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. . . .

All of this raises the possibility that the tragic shootings of unarmed men like Trayvon might reflect the mistaken determination by the shooters that the victim posed a lethal threat caused, in part, by the simple act of the shooter carrying a gun.